Sunday, May 18, 2014

vast (like this post)

So we still don’t know all we’d like to about our GC’s wife’s health but the CAT scans show what appears to be stage 4 liver cancer – ie: huge masses throughout the organ. We still need to learn if it’s a primary or secondary tumor, if it’s spread elsewhere (lymphatic system, brain) and if there are medications that could give her a few more months. From everything we’ve read, she’s not a candidate for a transplant so this is likely terminal.

For what it’s worth (squat), we got the news at 11:20am. The transfer was originally scheduled for 1pm. I kind of hate that we made the right call to cancel everything.

- - - - -

An old friend yesterday made a very wise observation. I had just spent the past couple of hours over lunch, telling her how things had fallen apart over the past 4 months. (note to self: if it takes you a couple of hours to cover everything… yikes.)

Anyway, she commented that I seemed awfully… hard on myself in the telling of the tale. Well, yeah, I admitted. I sort of have a black belt in beating up on myself. I feel extremely guilty about all this. She asked for clarification since of course, what I was saying didn’t appear to be a terribly rational take on things. So I listed my mistakes:

  • I should never have even considered surrogacy and read more about others’ experiences before embarking on this. I may have realized it could be too difficult financially and emotionally for us.
  • Instead of surrogacy, I should’ve put my time/money/efforts on taking better care of myself so that I don't require medication and could just carry the embryo myself.
  • I shouldn’t have allowed a friend to volunteer to be our surrogate. I should’ve said, thank you for the amazing offer but we’re going to go with a stranger who we're less emotionally intertwined with.
  • To that end: I did not adequately investigate what burdens she already had in her life, namely the state of her wife’s health. I did not want to pry & assumed the fertility clinic was adequately vetting this.
  • I should’ve listened to my gut when it told me that my friend was overwhelmed by the commitments she already had and stopped in February.
  • I should’ve been nosier when her wife received the initial cancer diagnosis. If we had known more, we would’ve immediately learned more about the prognosis & treatment for this type of cancer helped them find a specialist who may have caught the metastasis in time.
  • I should’ve told her not to hide bad news from us – that more information helps us make better decisions.
  • And there’s probably about 12 other things I blame myself for too.

And then my old friend reminded me that the universe is vast. And that there is so much that is just beyond our control. That biology and families and people are messy things. That we are not clairvoyant and cannot research our way into a complete prediction of the future. That sometimes life just spirals into a mess despite our best efforts.

And that made a lot of sense. And sounded pretty familiar since my husband had just recently told me almost exactly the same thing.... He said that I really needed to stop believing the script my parents had bequeathed me that there was a RIGHT choice for everything and every scenario. He said that one of the things that bugs him the most about my family is our belief that if we just think hard enough we can figure everything out. Anticipate every problem, game every situation, avoid every mistake. It’s not only just not true, it’s a dangerous, egotistical way of thinking. It makes you paranoid and overly cautious and very, very critical. And then my old friend asked me something that another friend had asked me just 24 hours before:

“What do you think the larger message is here?”

Normally, I bristle at questions like this. There is no larger message. There is no grand plan or god. Stop getting all Zen up in my face. Life just sucks sometimes for absolutely no reason. But this time it dawned on me: that doesn’t mean you can’t LEARN from the suckiness.

When my first friend asked me this, I nodded and said, YES. Finding a message in all this would be kind of nice – it would give me something to take away from all this mess – like a goody bag of wisdom handed out at the worst party every. I said:

“Well... when I realize this likely means we’ll never have kids, my initial reaction is that perhaps I get to spend my whole life taking care of myself and not someone else. I had a hard go of it for a long time and nurturing myself would not be the worst thing to happen in the second half of my life.”

But when my second friend asked me the same exact question yesterday, I instantly had a different answer. I don’t think my first answer was off base, it just wasn’t specific enough. We’d been talking about guilt and I said:

“Perhaps the message is that the best way to nurture myself is to forgive myself.”

Ever since I got super-duper-call-the-cops (twice) sick in 2003, I’ve been pretty hard on myself about how all that played out. I’ve always hated the idea that my mental illness made me a liability in the lives of those I loved and I often think that what I put my husband through 11 years ago is so unforgivable that I will never be able to make up for it. All I could do is try my damndest to never, ever let things get that messy again. I frequently ruminate over the mistakes I made back then:

  • I should’ve realized that I was self-medicating with alcohol and found a doctor to prescribe me proper medications instead.
  • When I finally broke down and did ask for meds, I should’ve gone to a psychiatrist and not my internist. I knew better, I was just scared of shrinks.
  • When I started the medication, I should never, ever have kept drinking. Or when I realized that I couldn’t do that, immediately asked for help.
  • When I did start to realize I couldn’t stop drinking, I should’ve just gone inpatient like people recommended and trusted my family to take care of me.
  • When I really started to go off the rails and it became clear that I needed hospitalization, I shouldn’t have fought it for so long & trusted my husband’s judgment.
  • When I thought there was no other way out besides suicide or lying, I should’ve just walked into the nearest hospital and said uncle. I came close one day. I stood in the elevator lobby of a local hospital and studied the directory. I knew which floor to get off on. I was just too scared of how much it would mess up my life. So I drove home.


I’m guess you could say I’m petrified of messiness. I’m scared of things getting dirty and disorganized and conflict and unpredictable disasters. But I cannot control everything and should not expect myself to do so. And I can try to forgive myself for thinking I could.


Because the universe is messy and unforgiving. And vast.

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Nevermind

Well. That ended rather quickly.

During a conversation yesterday morning with our GC (we were discussing transportation to next Friday’s 3rd embryo transfer) she casually mentioned that her wife would be having a PET scan the day before the transfer.

….

Oh that? That’s the sound of a needle scratching.

Apparently she has spots on her liver. Enormous spots. Spots the size of a salad plate. Spots that were 1/10th the size in November. They’re trying to think positive and just go on with their lives with a ‘business-as-usual’ mentality. ½ denial + ½ overwhelm + ½ they don’t live with a scientist.

But I do. And I instantly understood what we were potentially talking about here. Sometime the day before or the day of the embryo transfer next week, they are likely to learn that my best friend’s wife has terminal liver cancer. My husband did a quick pubmed search and discovered that the skin cancer she was diagnosed with 2 years ago typically metastasizes to the liver and has a 22% survival rate at 5 years.

We of course, did not know this when we agreed to try and have a baby with them. I’m not sure they know it. And of course, none of us is sure if this is what has happened. But salad-plate sized spots are never a harbinger of smooth seas ahead.

So over dinner last night my husband and I discussed what to do. Gamble on the test results coming back fine? That seemed so unlikely given all we were reading. And if we did that and the test results weren’t OK, we’d have to make all these decisions at the very last minute. And if for some reason we didn’t have all the information and went ahead with the transfer anyway we’d be in a really terrible spot. Either it’d fail and we’d always wonder if the stress of the situation had done it, or it’d WORK and we’d be watching our baby be gestated in possibly the most stressful situation we could imagine – while our GC watched her wife die. And if she is going to be extremely ill or die we’d be the ones who would want to help – not add another stressor to her life. We’d need to help out with her sons and support her and… and this was all getting WAY TOO FUCKED UP.

I looked at my husband and said: “I don’t know about you but my gut is screaming, ‘this is 110% more crazy than I can tolerate’”

And then I picked up the phone and in the most delicate way possible, told my best friend that we were stopping. I told her it was a “break” but I don’t really think that’s true. I think we’ve hit an enormous brick wall that we are not going to see the other side of. I think this is really and truly it. They will be dealing with a very serious illness and husband and I will be moving on with our lives.

Yes, we might briefly talk about if there are any other ideas left out there. I could attempt to wean myself off my medication and have a go at it myself. But I don’t know if that’s even possible or a good idea.

Right now, I have three main emotions:
  1. 1.     Relief. This cycle was getting hard to deal with. I don’t know why exactly. Chalk it up to battle fatigue. But knowing you’re walking into almost certain failure was not sitting well with me each passing day. And yesterday, that fatigue turned into panic and I just wasn’t going to be able to sit with that for the remaining 3 weeks.
  2. 2.     Guilt. I cannot believe my desire for a kid dragged my husband and I, my best friend and her wife and my parents into what turned out to be an incredibly expensive, upsetting and bafflingly complicated mess. I did not want to spend a year of our time/money/energy on something that turned out to be so pointless.
  3. 3.     Fear. I am not ready to hear that my friend’s wife is as sick as I think she is. I’m truly petrified for them. I’ve known her for 20 years. She is essentially my sister-in-law and the primary caregiver for my two ‘nephews.’ I do not want this for any of them.



I suppose if this really is the end – there will also be grief. But honestly, right now that’s just going to have to wait it’s turn.